If you’re a Google Maps fan in New Zealand today’s your lucky day, as the search specialists from Mountain View, CA have added live traffic condition information to the geographic platform. Those wondering just how dismal their evening commute will be can navigate to maps.google.co.nz, or use the various mobile applications, to see the verdict. Google notes that the information is available for “major cities and highways” and that it is working to expand and improve reach over time.

Hi all, apologies for the inconvience.

This article is under construction.

Please stay tuned.

Regards

The McDonalds IT Team.

Reader Daniel is tiring of typing his e-mail address. Every time he logs into a site, shares an article with someone, registers for an online forum, and so on, he has to type it in. So he wants a keyboard shortcut than can “paste my e-mail address into everything.” And while he’s at it, how about a second shortcut that will paste in his nickname/username or even a signature?

This is where Phase Express comes in, this killer bit of freeware automatically expands typed abbreviations. So to quickly insert, say, your e-mail address, you could type “em1″ (as in “e-mail address #1″), and PhraseExpress would instantly paste in the complete address. Likewise, you could type “sig” to insert a custom e-mail signature (complete with images and/or HTML code) at the end of e-mails.

Download Phase Express here, and here is a quick tutorial.

Once downloaded and installed, look to your Notification area and left click on this symbol  then select ‘Create new phrase’. Description will be your email address and Autotext will be the shortcut text. See Below



Click OK and you’re done, next time you come to type your email address enter ‘em1′ and your email address will be shown. Repeat if you have several email addresses and replace the 1 with a 2/3 etc.

Windows 7 is pretty. By default, your Windows 7 computer comes with all the visual display features turned on.

Did you know that you can opt for better overall performance by turning the visual features off? If you’re someone that’s not bothered by a more basic-looking user interface, this can be a fantastic way to help your computer run more smoothly. Give this a whirl:

Go to the Windows Start button, then Control Panel.

Click on Personalisation.

You’ll then see a screen showing a number of different ‘themes’ you can choose for your Windows 7 look. Click on Windows 7 Basic (or even Windows Classic if you are feeling like some nostalgia). You may need to scroll down to see these themes.

Clicking on them will automatically change your theme, though it may take a few minutes. Once this is done you will notice the change immediately. Many unnecessary visual features will be turned off, making your computer run faster and more efficiently.

I’ve recently been asked by a few friends: How can I give just one page in a Word document a landscape orientation when the rest of the pages are portrait?

It’s not an obvious feature but it can be done. It requires a little bit of tinkering, but it is worth it when you have reports and other documents that require one or two landscape pages. Here’s how to do it.

1. Find the section of your document that you want to be on a landscape-oriented page. Insert your cursor in a space before the section you’ve chosen by clicking there.

2. Click on the Page Layout tab, choose Breaks and then choose ‘New Page’ under Section Breaks. Then, move your cursor to the end of the section you’ve chosen for your landscape page, and insert the same break again.

3. Put your cursor anywhere in the section between the two breaks you’ve just created, by clicking.

4. Return to the Page Layout tab. At the bottom right-hand corner you’ll see a small arrow (pointing down); click it to open the Page Setup dialog box.

5. In the Page Setup box, click on the Margins tab. Select Landscape (under Orientation), then in the “Apply to” dropdown click on this section.

6. Click on OK, and voila!

If you’re like me, you work with a lot of Chrome tabs open at once. (Though I’m not as bad as my husband, who always works with at least 50 tabs open – I kid you not.)

Sometimes I close a tab and then realise I closed the wrong one, or I realise that I needed to refer to another piece of information on it. Well, luckily there’s a nifty feature in Chrome that lets you re-open the most recently closed tab.

To do this, you’ll first need to have some tabs open, and close one of them. It can be any tab you like.

Oh no! You have closed it. How do you get it back? Easy peasy. Right-click on the title bar, or right-click a tab. You’ll get the right-click menu and an option to Re-open Closed Tab. Click on that and the tab you previously closed will magically re-appear.

Here’s a screenshot to give you a better idea:

You can also press Ctrl + Shift + T on your keyboard to re-open the most recently closed tab, which is a lot easier and quicker.